Introduction - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 4

integrated water resources managemen t, 4 and international water course s, 5 l ittle
attention has been paid to Indigenous-led transboundary movements and impacts
of colonial borders on water resources (which are central themes found throughout
this volume). Zietoun et al. (2013) is a notable exception, with their work on the
Jordan River Basin.
In the last decade, more attention to power dynamics and environmental justice
has been included in discussions of water governance. Muehlmann's (2013) recent
ethnography related to the cultural-social-economic impacts of upstream diversion
on the Indigenous populations of the Colorado River Delta is also a notable
contribution to the transboundary environmental justice literature. In addition,
the rich literature on the politics of scale has helped to connect issues of power,
decision-making, and jurisdictional scale . 6 T he politics-of-scale literature has helped
to refine thinking about human-environmental and hydrosocial relation s. 7 In
addition, issues related to Indigenous communities and environmental justice
(Holifield, 2010; Ranco et al. , 2011), hydrohegemony (Zeitoun et al. , 2013) and
conceptual tools such as waterscapes (Budds and Hinojosa, 2012), hydrosocial
networks (Swyngedouw 2004), political economy (Bakker, 2003a, 2003b; Furlong
and Bakker, 2010), and performativity (Harris and Alatout, 2010; Cohen and Harris,
2014) all provide important contributions to understanding the complexities of
water politics and governance.
In particular, a waterscape approach, which sees water and society as co-
producing, is a useful tool for this analysis. A waterscape, as Molle (2009, p. 2)
defines it, is an “expression of the interaction between humans and their environ-
ment and encompasses all of the social, economic and political processes through
which water in nature is conceived of and manipulated by societies”. Thus, to
help link water and social power relations, Budds and Hinojosa suggest that the
waterscape approach usefully allows you to “explore the ways in which flows of
water, power, and capital converge to produce uneven socio-ecological arrange-
ments over space and time, the particular characteristics of which reflect the power
relations that shaped their production” (2012, p. 124).
While these previous studies have helped understand the dynamics associated
with hydrosocial networks, a dearth in research remains where these processes are
explored through the lens of Indigenous communities impacted by and involved
in transboundary water governance.
My theoretical contribution, in my mind, relates to reframing the dominant
narrative related to transboundary water governance. This reframing helps to
unpack the “border” in transborder as an active colonizing act, which continues
to shape and influence water policy and decision-making. Reframing the narrative
so that Indigenous communities are in the center of the discussion (rather than the
periphery or not in the dialogue at all) provides an avenue to explore how govern-
ance of water (a lifesource) can lead to wider projects such as decolonization and
self-determination. Mainstream dialogue reinforces colonial borders as fixed,
ahistorical, and unproblematized, while Indigenous spaces are often seen as a
historical relic. Thus, I use narrative to gently re-center the dialogue and open up
conceptual space for a more critical look at transborder water governance.